07/22/2013

Bankruptcy Musings: What If The University Of Michigan Were In Detroit?

Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon. In Cleveland, there's Case Western
Reserve. What if there had been, say, a Henry Ford University in
Detroit?

Here's the hypothesis:

A big research university probably couldn't have turned the ship of
many of Detroit's fundamental problems. It offers no obvious antidote to
political corruption, nor to the apparent blessing that proved a cancer
to Detroit: jobs that gave not just middle-class whites, but
working-class whites and eventually their black counterparts, the means
to move to the suburbs, eventually leaving only the black underclass in
the city.

But it might have offered some inoculation against economic
monoculture, which both left and right can agree was central to
Detroit's catastrophe. And it could have anchored neighborhoods, like Cleveland's University Circle,
that provide urban islands of relative stability during rough times and
then a base to build out from - exactly what Mayor Dave Bing is
desperately trying to seed in Detroit. Had
someone a century ago donated the equivalent of $1 billion today to
start a "Stanford on the Great Lakes" in Detroit, the effect might have
been profound.

Whatever you think of the hypothesis, the history recounted in the story is pretty interesting.

Comments

Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon. In Cleveland, there's Case Western
Reserve. What if there had been, say, a Henry Ford University in
Detroit?

Here's the hypothesis:

A big research university probably couldn't have turned the ship of
many of Detroit's fundamental problems. It offers no obvious antidote to
political corruption, nor to the apparent blessing that proved a cancer
to Detroit: jobs that gave not just middle-class whites, but
working-class whites and eventually their black counterparts, the means
to move to the suburbs, eventually leaving only the black underclass in
the city.

But it might have offered some inoculation against economic
monoculture, which both left and right can agree was central to
Detroit's catastrophe. And it could have anchored neighborhoods, like Cleveland's University Circle,
that provide urban islands of relative stability during rough times and
then a base to build out from - exactly what Mayor Dave Bing is
desperately trying to seed in Detroit. Had
someone a century ago donated the equivalent of $1 billion today to
start a "Stanford on the Great Lakes" in Detroit, the effect might have
been profound.

Whatever you think of the hypothesis, the history recounted in the story is pretty interesting.